I feel like people haven’t taken the “are mosquito nets bad because of overfishing” question seriously enough and that it might be time to stop funding mosquito nets because of it. (Or at least until we can find an org that only gives them out in places with very little opportunity for or reliance on fishing.) I think people just trust GiveWell on this, but I think that is a mistake: I can’t find any attempt by them to actually do even a back of the envelope calculation of the scale of the harm through things like increased food insecurity (or indeed harm to fish I guess.) And also, it’d be so mega embarrassing for them if nets were net negative, that I don’t really trust them to evaluate this fairly. (And actually that probably goes for any EA org, or to some extent public health people as a whole.) The last time this was discussed on the forum:
2) No one seemed to have a quick disproof that it made nets net negative. (Plus we also care if it just pushes their net effect below Give Directly or other options.)
3) There was surprisingly little participation in the discussion given how important this is. (Compared how much time we all spent on the Nonlinear scandal!).
I’ve seen people (i.e. Scott Alexander here: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1brg5t3/the_deaths_of_effective_altruism/) claim that this can’t be an issue, because AMF checks and most nets are used for their intended purpose in the first 3 years after they are given out. But I think it’s just an error to think that gets rid of the problem because nets can be used for fishing after they are used to protect from malaria. So the rate of misuse is not really capped by the rate of proper usage.
Considering how much of what EA has done so far has been bednets, I’m having a slight “are we the baddies” crisis about this.
“Fishing,” said the old man “is at least as complicated as any other industry”.
I was sitting in a meeting of representatives of the other end of the fishing industry: fleets of North Sea trawlers turning over >£1million each per year, fishing in probably the world’s most studied at-risk fishing ecosystem. They were fuming because in the view of the scientists studying North Sea fish, cod stocks had reached dangerously low levels and their quotas needed reducing, but in the view of the fishermen actually catching the fish, cod stocks off the east coast of England were at such high levels they hit their month’s cod quota in a day whilst actively trying to avoid catching cod. (I have no reason to believe that either view was uninformed or deceptive). “What they’re probably not factoring in,” he closed on, “is that cod populations in different regions are cyclical”
The point of that waffly anecdote is that factoring in the effects of mosquito nets on local fish ecosystems would actually be really hard, because an RCT in one area over one year really isn’t going to tell you much about the ecosystems in other areas, or in other years. Even more so in isolated African watercourses. (I think we can largely rule out the hypothesis that amateurs with free 2x2m malaria nets instead of proper nets and boats are depleting the seas more than foreign factory ships with nets hundreds of metres long...)
Like you, I don’t find the idea that ~80% of distributed nets are appropriately used (at least for the first year) to have settled the debate, but quite a few things have to be the case for AMF’s distribution programs to be the major factor in ecosystem harm caused by overfishing:
the level of fishing with relatively small mosquito nets is sufficient to destroy fish stocks in the immediate area
other areas are unable to replenish the fish stocks depleted in the local area
in the absence of a continuing supply of free mosquito nets, people wouldn’t nevertheless use mosquito nets—which are also available for sale at a relatively low cost—for fishing
the most likely alternatives to mosquito nets for local fishermen—potentially including other fabrics which also don’t allow smaller fish to pass through—don’t have the same impact on the ecosystem
for the program to be net negative for humans, you’ve also got to assume
avoidable future falls in fishing stocks actually kill people. Or at least that the net economic loss from them is so great it outweighs the lives saved and malaria cases averted (and short term positive impact on availability of nutritious fish!). For the overall programme to be net negative we’re looking at ~24k deaths per year...
Plus of course many of the nets are distributed in regions where fishing wasn’t viable in the first place...
There is a tension between different EA ideas here in my view. Early on, I recall, the emphasis was on how you need charity evaluators like GiveWell, and RTCs by randomista development economists, because you can’t predict what interventions will work well, or even do more good than harm, on the basis of common sense intuition. (I remember Will giving examples like “actually, having prisoners talk to children about how horrible being in prison is seems to make the children more likely to grow up to commit crimes.) But it turns out that when assessing interventions, there are always points where there just isn’t high quality data on whether some particular factor importantly reduces (or increases) the intervention’s effectiveness. So at that point, we have to rely on commonsense, mildly disciplined by back of the envelope calculations, possibly supplemented by poor quality data if we’re lucky. And then it feels unfair when this is criticized by outsiders (like the recent polemical anti-EA piece in Wired) because well, what else can you possibly do if high-quality studies aren’t available and it’s not feasible to do them yourself? But I guess from the outsider’s perspective, it’s easy to see why this looks like hypocrisy: they criticized other people for relying on their general hunches about how things work, but now the EAs are doing it themselves! I’m not really sure what the general solution (if any) to this is. But it does feel to my like there are a vast number of choice points in GiveWell’s analyses where they are mostly guessing, and if those guesses are all biased in some direction rather than uncorrelated, assessments of interventions will be way off.
As an aside, I’m pretty underwhelmed by concerns about using LLINs as fishing nets. These concerns are very media-worthy, but I’m more worried about things like “People just never bother to hang up their LLIN,” which I’d guess is a more common issue. The LLIN usage data we use would (if accurate) account for both.
Besides the harm caused by some people contracting malaria because they don’t sleep under their nets, which we already account for in our cost-effectiveness analysis, the article warns that fishing with insecticide treated nets may deplete fish stocks. In making this case, the article cites only one study, which reports that about 90% of households in villages along Lake Tanganyika used bed nets to fish. It doesn’t cite any studies examining the connection between bed nets and depleted fish stocks more directly. The article states that “Recent hydroacoustic surveys show that Zambia’s fish populations are dwindling” and “recent surveys show that Madagascar’s industrial shrimp catch plummeted to 3,143 tons in 2010 from 8,652 tons in 2002,” but declines in fish populations and shrimp catch may have causes other than mosquito net-fishing.
The Wired article says that there’s been a bunch more research in recent years about the effects of bed nets on fish stocks, so I would consider the GiveWell response out of date
I don’t actually find either all THAT reassuring. The GW blogpost just says most nets are used for their intended purpose, but 30% being used otherwise is still a lot, not to mention they can be used for their intended purpose and the later to fish. The Cold Takes blog post just cites the same data about most nets being used for their intended purpose.
you do bring up an interesting point that this should be factored into where nets are distributed.
(this is a very draft-stage idea) maybe if the nets weren’t that water-proof, this issue would be solved? (cons: flooding, rain, potential pollution if, in the water, it dissipates, and less durability)
Maybe mention this to someone at givewell? idk tho
I feel like people haven’t taken the “are mosquito nets bad because of overfishing” question seriously enough and that it might be time to stop funding mosquito nets because of it. (Or at least until we can find an org that only gives them out in places with very little opportunity for or reliance on fishing.) I think people just trust GiveWell on this, but I think that is a mistake: I can’t find any attempt by them to actually do even a back of the envelope calculation of the scale of the harm through things like increased food insecurity (or indeed harm to fish I guess.) And also, it’d be so mega embarrassing for them if nets were net negative, that I don’t really trust them to evaluate this fairly. (And actually that probably goes for any EA org, or to some extent public health people as a whole.) The last time this was discussed on the forum:
1) the scale seemed quite concerning (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/enH4qj5NzKakt5oyH/is-mosquito-net-fishing-really-net-positive)
2) No one seemed to have a quick disproof that it made nets net negative. (Plus we also care if it just pushes their net effect below Give Directly or other options.)
3) There was surprisingly little participation in the discussion given how important this is. (Compared how much time we all spent on the Nonlinear scandal!).
I’ve seen people (i.e. Scott Alexander here: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1brg5t3/the_deaths_of_effective_altruism/) claim that this can’t be an issue, because AMF checks and most nets are used for their intended purpose in the first 3 years after they are given out. But I think it’s just an error to think that gets rid of the problem because nets can be used for fishing after they are used to protect from malaria. So the rate of misuse is not really capped by the rate of proper usage.
Considering how much of what EA has done so far has been bednets, I’m having a slight “are we the baddies” crisis about this.
“Fishing,” said the old man “is at least as complicated as any other industry”.
I was sitting in a meeting of representatives of the other end of the fishing industry: fleets of North Sea trawlers turning over >£1million each per year, fishing in probably the world’s most studied at-risk fishing ecosystem. They were fuming because in the view of the scientists studying North Sea fish, cod stocks had reached dangerously low levels and their quotas needed reducing, but in the view of the fishermen actually catching the fish, cod stocks off the east coast of England were at such high levels they hit their month’s cod quota in a day whilst actively trying to avoid catching cod. (I have no reason to believe that either view was uninformed or deceptive). “What they’re probably not factoring in,” he closed on, “is that cod populations in different regions are cyclical”
The point of that waffly anecdote is that factoring in the effects of mosquito nets on local fish ecosystems would actually be really hard, because an RCT in one area over one year really isn’t going to tell you much about the ecosystems in other areas, or in other years. Even more so in isolated African watercourses. (I think we can largely rule out the hypothesis that amateurs with free 2x2m malaria nets instead of proper nets and boats are depleting the seas more than foreign factory ships with nets hundreds of metres long...)
Like you, I don’t find the idea that ~80% of distributed nets are appropriately used (at least for the first year) to have settled the debate, but quite a few things have to be the case for AMF’s distribution programs to be the major factor in ecosystem harm caused by overfishing:
the level of fishing with relatively small mosquito nets is sufficient to destroy fish stocks in the immediate area
other areas are unable to replenish the fish stocks depleted in the local area
in the absence of a continuing supply of free mosquito nets, people wouldn’t nevertheless use mosquito nets—which are also available for sale at a relatively low cost—for fishing
the most likely alternatives to mosquito nets for local fishermen—potentially including other fabrics which also don’t allow smaller fish to pass through—don’t have the same impact on the ecosystem
for the program to be net negative for humans, you’ve also got to assume
avoidable future falls in fishing stocks actually kill people. Or at least that the net economic loss from them is so great it outweighs the lives saved and malaria cases averted (and short term positive impact on availability of nutritious fish!). For the overall programme to be net negative we’re looking at ~24k deaths per year...
Plus of course many of the nets are distributed in regions where fishing wasn’t viable in the first place...
There is a tension between different EA ideas here in my view. Early on, I recall, the emphasis was on how you need charity evaluators like GiveWell, and RTCs by randomista development economists, because you can’t predict what interventions will work well, or even do more good than harm, on the basis of common sense intuition. (I remember Will giving examples like “actually, having prisoners talk to children about how horrible being in prison is seems to make the children more likely to grow up to commit crimes.) But it turns out that when assessing interventions, there are always points where there just isn’t high quality data on whether some particular factor importantly reduces (or increases) the intervention’s effectiveness. So at that point, we have to rely on commonsense, mildly disciplined by back of the envelope calculations, possibly supplemented by poor quality data if we’re lucky. And then it feels unfair when this is criticized by outsiders (like the recent polemical anti-EA piece in Wired) because well, what else can you possibly do if high-quality studies aren’t available and it’s not feasible to do them yourself? But I guess from the outsider’s perspective, it’s easy to see why this looks like hypocrisy: they criticized other people for relying on their general hunches about how things work, but now the EAs are doing it themselves! I’m not really sure what the general solution (if any) to this is. But it does feel to my like there are a vast number of choice points in GiveWell’s analyses where they are mostly guessing, and if those guesses are all biased in some direction rather than uncorrelated, assessments of interventions will be way off.
Thanks that is helpful. It’s frustrating how hard it is to be sure about this.
there have been a few “EA” responses to this issue but TBF they can be a bit hard to find
https://www.cold-takes.com/minimal-trust-investigations/
https://blog.givewell.org/2015/02/05/putting-the-problem-of-bed-nets-used-for-fishing-in-perspective/
The Wired article says that there’s been a bunch more research in recent years about the effects of bed nets on fish stocks, so I would consider the GiveWell response out of date
I don’t actually find either all THAT reassuring. The GW blogpost just says most nets are used for their intended purpose, but 30% being used otherwise is still a lot, not to mention they can be used for their intended purpose and the later to fish. The Cold Takes blog post just cites the same data about most nets being used for their intended purpose.
I had seen the second of these at some point I think, but not the first.
you do bring up an interesting point that this should be factored into where nets are distributed.
(this is a very draft-stage idea) maybe if the nets weren’t that water-proof, this issue would be solved? (cons: flooding, rain, potential pollution if, in the water, it dissipates, and less durability)
Maybe mention this to someone at givewell? idk tho